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Darn it, unity or unreal....which one to invest my time in learning?!?

Graphic wise they look about on par but which is easiest for a CGI/designer to get their head around? Be interested in anyones thoughts.

If you haven't done either and are new to the game engine paradigm and are not strong regards programming, try starting with Unity 3D
- Have a look on Udemy.com, there are some stand-out courses (ref Ben Tristen) really cheap to help ease your way into this arena
- The coding is C#, whereas Unreal uses C++
- The asset store for Unity is a massive help

But you know, it doesn't have to be either/or. If after a while you feel you have the hang of Unity, you can always "step up" and start playing wit Unreal
- as I recall Ben Tristen has Udemy training material for this
- Ryan Roye has an excellent training intro also (I'm going by his promo video, looks great)
- friends have told me Unreal has built in solutions to deal with some issues which may require a 3rd party solution in Unity

… it's almost like you can't lose researching both and both appear to be getting lots of development TLC

Cheers fellas. They both have real appeal. At the moment I'm just looking for a kind of showroom platform for our products so realism, and kick *** shaders would be priority. I'm no stranger to code either so I'm sure I could get a handle on it. Unreal sounds like the ticket for now. Cheers both!

I'm still not a fan of real time GPU based rendering. I like the idea of render engines that use GPU processing power like Octane but I'm not convinced video game style real time rendering is good enough yet. Maybe I will be at some point as it gets better. I guess I'm just old school.

You can get similar results to Unreal in Unity, the thing is you have to work a little harder to get there (adding all the appropriate packages for post processing, reflection planes etc etc) in Unreal everything is set to near highest quality from the start and there is more info on using Unreal as a render engine than Unity.

We changed to Unreal for rendering last year and I see no way I'm going back to traditional rendering unless it gets really fast or hardware gets really cheap. The game changer for us is revisions. After we export the frames and compose the video we have supervisors look at it and they give us their feedback, and the changes are usually done in a couple hours. Camera tweaks for example. If I spent a few days rendering something in the traditional way and the supervisor or client wants the camera to go slower in a section, I'd feel a sudden urge to choke them. In Unreal I just smile and say "OK, I'll show it to you in about an hour."

It's not all roses tho, there is much to learn, the shading system is powerful but very different, standard materials are slow to update when you make changes (unless you use master and instanced materials system but that takes time to set up too) and some scenes might need a few hours of GI rendering for ach-viz stuff. (in fairness it's very easy to distribute the load if you have a lot of machines). Also global illumination artifacts do happen on some geometry and many times the only solution is to carefully unwrap and align the GI cache UVs.

I teach both UnReal and Unity for game design, have done for about 10 years, and on the whole non-computer science students prefer UnReal. The Blueprint system opens the whole UnReal engine to visual scripting, which most of my students find more intuitive.

Unity is great if you're already a good coder in C or C++. It's easy to move to Unity style C#. Having Visual Studio integration has improved Unity's coding workflow. More comp sci students like it for that reason.

As for the rendering I think UnReal looks better with less effort, but Unity can get close if you are an expert at tweaking its materials, lighting, camera...

One advantage to Unity over Unreal is support for the latest devices (VR, AR, Magic Leap, etc.). Unity always seems to get the libraries (packages) for these devices first, then they eventually come out for UnReal after a month or two … or sometimes longer …